Chapter 105 — Valmiki's Instruction

While Rama's great sacrifice continued, Valmiki arrived at Naimisha with his disciples. He saw the rite shining with extraordinary order and made a small encampment apart from the quarters of the other rishis. There, among simple huts, he called Lava and Kusha to him.

The distance between the two camps was more than physical. At the center of Naimisha stood a king's sacrifice, supplied by wealth and attended by rulers. At its edge, Valmiki made the plain dwellings of an ashram: a place for students who lived by disciplined practice and the food the forest offered. Yet the poem Valmiki had composed would cross between those worlds.

The boys had grown in the hermitage, trained in the poem their teacher had made. Valmiki gave them a public charge.

“Go with attention,” he said, “and sing the whole Ramayana with joy.”

They were to sing in the rishis' quarters, among the brahmins' dwellings, in streets and royal roads, and in the houses of kings. Most particularly, they were to sing at Rama's doorway and wherever the ritual work was taking place, before the officiating priests.

Valmiki gave them the provisions of their own forest life: sweet fruit grown on mountain heights and clean roots to eat. They were not to tire themselves by seeking food in the city. Nor were they to desire payment.

“What use is wealth to those who live in an ashram and eat fruit and roots?” he asked.

The instruction protected the character of the boys' appearance. They were not being sent to seek patronage, entertain the court for payment, or announce themselves as claimants to Rama's household. They were to be heard because the poem was to be heard. Their teacher gave them a rule of conduct as exact as the musical measures: receive what the forest provides; do not let the desire for wealth change why you sing.

If Rama asked whose children they were, they were to say only this: they were Valmiki's disciples. If invited to sing before Rama seated among rishis, they were to begin. Twenty cantos, the sections into which Valmiki had divided it, were to be sung each day, in the measures and manner he had taught them. They were to sing from the beginning and never show disrespect to the king, who, Valmiki told them, is by dharma a father to all beings.

The brothers took the instruction into their hearts. They prepared their sweet-stringed instruments, settled the pitch and rhythm Valmiki had taught, and waited through the night with eager attention. In the morning, their voices would enter the city of the sacrifice.

Valmiki's restraint mattered as much as his command. The boys were to offer a poem that told Rama's life before Rama himself, but they were not to announce the bloodline that joined singer and subject. They would move through public roads and ritual spaces as students of a sage, carrying no claim for reward and no demand for recognition.

He also told them not to disrespect Rama. A king, he said, is by dharma a father to all beings. The saying gave the boys a public relation to Rama without disclosing the private relation the audience did not yet know. It was both an instruction in conduct and a boundary around the truth that Valmiki was holding back.

In the small hermitage camp, the scale of the royal sacrifice lay beyond the huts. The boys had only their instruments, their teacher's instruction, and the poem held in memory. That was enough for the next morning.